The timing of Putin’s visit, which had been in the works for months, could not have been more interesting. It comes days after a US bipartisan congressional report expressed concerns about what it called “ultimate coordination” between China and Russia, warning that the United States must prepare for possible simultaneous wars with both countries.

03:05

Nato leaders slam China over Russia ties and Taiwan threats in bloc’s strongest rebuke yet

Nato leaders slam China over Russia ties and Taiwan threats in bloc’s strongest rebuke yet

Such a scenario would leave the US facing “two nuclear peer adversaries” for the first time. While Russia remained a nuclear peer, China’s rapid military rise meant it was advancing towards “peer status across the full range of military capabilities,” Thursday’s report from the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the US said.

It was the first such major review of Washington’s strategic posture to be published since 2009.

Describing the global environment as “fundamentally different [to] anything experienced in the past, even in the darkest days of the Cold War”, the report called for a dramatic overhaul of the US nuclear arsenal and strategic posture to tackle the “potentially existential challenges” in a threat environment “characterised by Chinese and Russian aggressive policies and actions”.

“Today, the United States is on the cusp of having not one, but two nuclear peer adversaries, each with ambitions to change the international status quo, by force, if necessary: a situation which the United States did not anticipate and for which it is not prepared,” the commission’s chair and vice chair said in their preface to the 145-page report.

While the possibility of a disastrous nuclear conflict remained low, “the risk of military conflict with either or both Russia and China, while not inevitable, has grown, and with it the risk of nuclear use, possibly against the US homeland”, the preface said.

Warning that the Chinese and Russian threats would become acute in the 2027-2035 time frame, the report said “decisions need to be made now in order for the nation to be prepared”.

‘Nuclear war killer’ US stirring pot with Russia and China, North Korea says

Ahead of his trip to Beijing, Putin on Sunday dismissed suggestions that the US must prepare to fight both Russia and China simultaneously as “nonsense”, and blamed Washington for stoking tensions with both countries.

“To say that the United States is preparing for war with Russia, well we are all preparing for war because we follow the ancient principle: if you want peace, get ready for war,” Reuters reported Putin as telling a Russian reporter.

“But we want peace,” Putin said, adding: “I don’t think it is serious. I think they are just scaring each other.”

Beijing has made no official comment on the congressional report so far, but the Global Times, a state-controlled nationalist tabloid, denounced it as “full of geopolitical fanaticism and war imagery” that would jeopardise the recent US-China detente.

02:49

‘China will not challenge or replace the US’, Xi tells Blinken at crucial meeting

‘China will not challenge or replace the US’, Xi tells Blinken at crucial meeting

In an editorial on Saturday, it said the report was “deeply unsettling” and had crossed the “red line” of being addressed as “formal political agenda”. The two-war scenario was “a strategic nightmare” that departed from Biden’s national security strategy “of winning one conflict while deterring another”, it said.

It also accused the US of promoting a nuclear arms race “under the banner of ‘deterrence’”.

However, the paper nonetheless admitted that discussions about such a scenario, “once a fringe fantasy”, had become increasingly politically acceptable in the US and made its way into Washington’s agenda.

In fact, the report’s warning about a two-war construct and recommendation of a “nuclear force modernisation” programme stands in contrast to the Biden administration’s assertion that the current US nuclear arsenal is sufficient to deter the combined forces of Russia and China.

“The United States does not need to increase our nuclear forces to outnumber the combined total of our competitors in order to successfully deter them,” Biden’s National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said in June.

“We’re the United States of America for God’s sake, the most powerful nation in the history – not in the world, in the history of the world,” Biden said in a 60 Minutes interview that aired on Sunday, when talking about simultaneous military support to Israel against Hamas and Ukraine against Russia.

“We can take care of both of these and still maintain our overall international defence. We have the capacity to do this, and we have an obligation to do it. We are the essential nation, to paraphrase the former secretary of state and if we don’t, who does?”

However, many observers remained unconvinced,

citing the political divide in Washington and difficulties in raising the US military budget.

“[There is] a massive mismatch between strategy and resources,” Elbridge Colby, a China hawk and former deputy assistant secretary of defence under Biden’s predecessor Donald Trump, commented.

“And note he didn’t mention China,” Colby posted.